ULTRV

Themes and design

Pick a look, adjust how it reads, and see all of it before it goes live.

Everything visual about a blog lives in one place:Settings → Appearance. There is no CSS to write, no template to fork, and no theme to install. You choose a theme, then adjust a short list of things about how it reads. That is the whole surface.

The theme picker

Edit appearance opens a full-screen picker with two tabs: Choose theme andCustomize. The header tells you which theme is currently applied, and the right-hand half of the screen is a live preview of your own blog — your posts, your title, your nav — not a stock mockup.

The theme picker: a left column of theme thumbnails labelled Default, Blank, Terminal, Redacted, Natural, Brutalist, Elite, Old Blogger, WP Classic and Ghostly, under category filters reading All 84, Clean 36, Dark 4, Warm 17, Retro 19, Code 1 and Japanese 7. The right half previews a real blog with a hero post.
Settings → Appearance → Edit appearance

There are 84 themes, filtered by seven tabs across the top of the list:

  • All — 84
  • Clean — 36, the plain-text end: Default, Blank, Swiss, Tufte, Notebook, Broadsheet
  • Dark — 4, including Terminal, Elite and Synthwave
  • Warm — 17, softer palettes: Cottagecore, Polaroid, Herbarium, Art Deco
  • Retro — 19, the web that was: GeoCities, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vaporwave, Y2K
  • Code — 1, Syntax
  • Japanese — 7, Tegami, Washi, Ukiyo-e, Kintsugi and others

The theme galleryshows all of them at a readable size if you would rather browse before you sign in.

Preview, then apply

Clicking a thumbnail changes the preview, not the blog. Nothing your readers see moves until you pressApply theme.Cancel throws the whole session away and leaves you where you started, and theDesktop /Mobile toggle above the preview shows how the same choice behaves at phone width. Switching themes later costs nothing — posts are stored as content, not as markup tied to a design.

The appearance summary

The Appearance page itself is a summary rather than a control panel. The card at the top names the theme in use and describes it in one line. Below that sit two panels, each with its ownEdit button, listing the settings as they currently stand.

The Appearance settings page showing the Editorial theme card, and two panels: Reading layout listing post list style Rich, 10 posts per page, month separators off and featured images shown; Typography and colour listing the Artisan font pairing, Normal text size, and Auto colour mode.
Settings → Appearance

Reading layout

How posts appear when a visitor lands on a list page. Four settings:

  • Post list style —Rich gives each post a title, date, preview and optional cover image; Dense puts the date and title link on one row. Dense suits an archive of hundreds of short entries; Rich suits a blog where the pictures matter.
  • Posts per page — 5, 10, 15, 25 or 50 before pagination. Dense lists read well with more on screen.
  • Month separators — off by default, giving a flat list. Turned on, entries are grouped under month headings, which is the right choice for a journal and the wrong one for a blog that posts twice a year.
  • Featured images — shown on the post list and at the top of posts, or hidden everywhere on the public blog.

Typography and colour

How the text reads and which palette it sits on.

  • Colour mode —Auto follows each visitor's system preference. Lightand Dark force one for everybody. Auto is the honest default: it is the reader's machine, and they have already told it what they want.
  • Palette — a row of swatches, for the themes that ship with more than one colourway. Themes that have a single fixed palette do not show the row.
  • Font pairing — ten named pairings of a heading face and a body face, each previewed in place: System Default, Clean Editorial, Warm Modern, Contemporary, Tech Editorial, Bold Classic, Technical, Artisan, Literary and Sharp Modern.
  • Text size — Small, Normal, Large or Extra large. This scales every reading element relative to the theme's own baseline, so it works on all 84 themes rather than fighting them.
The Customize tab: a settings rail with colour mode set to Auto, five palette swatches, a featured images toggle switched on, Rich and Dense post list style cards, a month separators toggle switched off, posts per page options 5 10 15 25 50 with 10 selected, four text size options with Normal selected, and font pairing previews for System Default and Clean Editorial.
Settings → Appearance → Customize

Every control in this rail updates the preview beside it as you touch it, and the sameApply theme button commits the lot in one go. Theme and customisation are saved together, so you can try a Retro theme at Large text on a warm palette and abandon all three with one press of Cancel.

When the settings run out

There is one escape hatch, underSettings → Custom code: aHead code field added to the<head>of your blog, and a Body code field added at the end of the<body>. They are meant for analytics, custom fonts and meta tags rather than for rebuilding the theme, and whatever you put there runs on your readers' machines. ULTRV puts no trackers on your blog; this field is the only way one gets there.

If the built-in options genuinely do not cover what you need, theREST APIand full export mean the content is never trapped behind the design. That is the trade ULTRV makes: less control over the markup, in exchange for nothing to maintain.

Where design meets the rest

Two settings elsewhere change how the blog looks to people who are not looking at it in a browser. Acustom domainchanges the address in every link and feed, and thefeed settingscontrol what subscribers get, which no theme affects.

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